Word: ohira
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After 25 years in power, Japan's right-of-center Liberal Democratic Party appeared ready for the taking. Its leader, Prime Minister Masayoshi Ohira, 70, had died of a heart attack only ten days before the elections. The party, moreover, had been declining in popularity. There had been widespread disenchantment with its ceaseless factional disputes and with the kind of corruption that led to the 1976 indictment of former Prime Minister Kakuei Tanaka in the Lockheed bribery scandal. Opposition leaders talked confidently of winning enough seats to force the Liberal Democrats into a coalition government...
...party brings down Ohira...
...comedy of miscalculations that left Japan's politicians in shock, the government of Prime Minister Masayoshi Ohira was suddenly toppled last week and forced to call for new elections. The defeat of the conservative Liberal Democratic Party Cabinet came on a no-confidence vote that was introduced by the opposition Socialist Party. The motion leveled serious charges against the government: inaction against corruption in its ranks, recklessly inflationary economic policies, excessive defense spending. Still, it was no more devastating than a number of other opposition attacks. This time, to everyone's astonishment, 70 legislators in Ohira...
...Socialists failed to reckon with anti-Ohira L.D.P. factions, led by former Prime Ministers Takeo Fukuda and Takeo Miki and former Defense Minister Yasuhiro Nakasone. The rebels had been demanding that Ohira, 70, step down. Even so, they were not expected to seriously split the party. After the vote, Fukuda insisted that he had warned his faction members against such a move. "It was a big miscalculation," he said. Later, however, he refused to rule out the possibility that he might bolt and form a new conservative party...
...Ohira was so angry that he refused comment. The Prime Minister, who took office in December 1978 after defeating Fukuda for the party leadership, had just returned from meetings in Mexico, Canada and with President Carter in Washington. He will remain as caretaker until the elections are held, probably at about the same time as the upper-house balloting next month. But by then he will have had to face an even tougher fight to prove once again that he is the strongest man within his own party...